I am brand new to this forum so hopefully I am in the right place and please forgive me if I'm violating protocol in some way.

I have been a self-employed web developer since 2000 and back then designed a number of Perl-CGI and Berkeley database driven proprietary content management systems which have all been running without a problem or glitch or breakdown for the last 12 years. I really can't take the credit for this as I merely designed the systems and I hired a young genius Perl programmer from Tucson, Arizona to write the backends, and he did a fabulous job. Like I said, there has not been a single problem in 12 years on dozens of installations with a total of hundreds of scripts and databases. On CMS is huge with thousands of pages.

Unfortunately that changed in March 2013 when a strange anomaly began to happen. I am posting here in hopes that someone here can confirm that kind of issue is in fact possible after 12 years of incident-free continuous running.

So here is the problem:

The script inserts records into the Berkely DB in chronological order via the Perl-CGI script and generates an HTML with these records in a list. The list can be reordered manually. Last March the list began intermittently getting scrambled and going out of order and generating this scrambled order on the HMTL page.

As well, old records are being inserted periodically in among the current records in addition to the scrambling thus producing a list on the HTML page that is out of order and has several formerly deleted records. Some of these old records that are now being inserted had been deleted from the database via the script and backend interface years ago, and now they are showing up in the database. I am completely bewildered as to how this could be happening other than that those records never got purged from the DB in the first place.

This phenomenon is only happening on one of website and not any of the others. And what is even more strange is that this particular website is a bilingual site - English and French - and consists of two entirely separate websites (a French site and an English one located in two separate sub-directories) so there is NO connection at all between them - and yet this problem is happening on both homepages - sometimes on one site, sometimes on the other, and sometimes on both at the same time. (Could this be malicious tampering?).

My skill level is that I am able to install and configure Perl scripts but that is the extent of my ability. The original programmer has been out of the picture for years and I really need some expert help on this. I have been trying to find a programmer or some firm that would trouble shoot this and give me an assessment, there are funds available for this.

Finally, if this is the wrong place for me to post this kind of request please excuse me once again and could I ask you to direct me to the appropriate place?

If you're only seeing these issues at one location/installation, then you need to look at the differences between that location and the others.

Did they restore any of the files from old archives?

Did someone on there end edit any of the files?

Can you narrow down the problem to one or two of the scripts? If so, can you post them so we can take a look?

If that's not possible, then you'll need to hire a very experienced Perl programmer to analyze the app. If the app is as large and complex as you describe, then going that route will be very expensive.